Performance Government: Activating and regulating the self-governing capacities of teachers and school leaders

Abstract

This article analyses ‘performance government’ as an emergent form of rule in advanced liberal democracies. It discloses how teachers and school leaders in Australia are being governed by the practices of performance government which centre on the recently established Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) and are given direction by two major strategies implicit within the exercise of this form of power: activation and regulation. Through an ‘analytics of government’ of these practices, the article unravels the new configurations of corporatized expert and academic knowledge—and their attendant methods of application—by which the self-governing capacities of teachers and school leaders are being activated and regulated in ways that seek to optimize the performance of these professionals. The article concludes by outlining some of the dangers of performance government for the professional freedom of educators and school leaders.

Keywords:

• governmentality
• performance government
• liberalism
• professional standards
• professional learning

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gavin Kendall and Matthew Ball for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The vocabulary and practices of ‘performance’ have been approached from theoretical perspectives other than that of governmentality. Most notable in educational theory is the work of Stephen J. Ball (e.g. Ball, 2003; Ball & Olmedo, 2013) who draws on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of ‘performativity’ and aspects of the work of Foucault to develop a concept of performativity as a ‘new mode of state regulation’ (Ball, 2003, p. 215). (For an account of the way in which Foucault is ‘inappropriately employed in certain aspects of [Ball’s] work’ (Wang, 2011, p. 142), see Wang (2011).) More recently, Locke (2013), in the pages of this journal, has explored ‘performativity, performance and education’ (Locke, p. 1) by utilizing Lyotard’s notion of performativity in conjunction with the work of other postmodern cultural theorists.